Into the Melting Pot: Asian Youths Try Crime : Gangs Prey on Their Own; Brazen Heists

Two weeks ago, in the darkness of late evening, five young Vietnamese men armed with handguns walked into the North Long Beach apartment of a middle-aged Vietnamese woman and ordered her to lie face down on the floor.

“They said, ‘If you don’t do what we say, we’ll kill you.’ And she complied,” police Sgt. Robert Titus said.

The young men, bare-faced and brazen, took everything the woman had--about $4,000 in jewelry she had been unwilling to entrust to a bank.

Two weeks earlier, as the owner of a 10th Street Cambodian market was locking his shop for the day, three unmasked Vietnamese in their 20s stole the purse of the merchant’s wife, firing three shots when challenged and wounding a passer-by.

Witnesses Fear Retaliation

And, in a third recent Long Beach robbery by a group of young Vietnamese, the Cambodian owner of a central-city shop and his family were forced to lie face down while their home was looted of more than $24,000 in cash, jewelry and gold.

Again, the armed thieves did not bother to cover their faces. “Witnesses are deathly afraid of retaliation,” Titus explained. The robbers also count on their victims’ proven distrust of a criminal justice system that arrests law-breakers and then releases them within hours on bail, he said.

As ranking officer of Long Beach’s small anti-gang unit, the sergeant has, out of necessity, acquired a quick expertise on Southeast Asian gangs.

Since last fall, identified Asian gang crime has dramatically escalated in Long Beach, said Titus and other Police Department officers.

“I don’t think there is any question that Southeast Asian crime is a growing problem,” Deputy Chief David Dusenbury said last week. “It is serious, and a lot of it goes unreported.”

Asians themselves are the victims of a growing number of strong-arm offenses, such as robbery and extortion. But the criminal activities of Indochinese youths are reaching well beyond the 35,000-resident Asian immigrant community in the central city, police say.

Nearly every Long Beach neighborhood has been hit by a rash of auto burglaries and thefts by Vietnamese youths from Orange County and, increasingly, by home-grown Cambodian and Vietnamese delinquents, local police and Southeast Asian community leaders say.

Big Jump in Auto Thefts

Police said that last year’s dramatic 19% increase in automobile burglary--993 incidents more than the previous year--and 17% jump in auto theft--722 more car thefts than the previous year--were partially the result of Asian gang activity, especially on the city’s affluent Eastside.

Sharp increases continued during the first three months of this year, crime reports show.

On the Eastside, in shopping center parking lots, “it was getting so they would steal stereos as fast as (drivers) could park their cars,” said a Long Beach undercover officer.

A crackdown this spring has reversed that trend, police said, but department statistics are not yet available to confirm the reduction.

Not only have immigrant youths from here and Orange County discovered Long Beach’s criminal opportunities, the city also has become a destination for somewhat older roving bands of Indochinese criminals who move from city to city nationwide, preying on their native countrymen, said several area police officials.

Valuables Kept at Home

Southeast Asians are robbed because they often keep valuables in their homes, are easily intimidated and are reluctant to cooperate with police, who were frequently corrupt in their homelands, police said.

A local Asian crime specialist, who works undercover and requested anonymity, said he knows of several cases in which local Vietnamese youths have hopped planes to commit crimes in other cities. For example, two were convicted recently of a jewelry store robbery in Toronto, Canada, he said.

“They’re highly transient. They plan robberies here and call for help from Houston or San Diego,” the officer said.

The thieves generate confusion by working out of town and using different names when arrested, he said. And the absence of any centralized computer file of Southeast Asian criminals makes the thieves’ job that much easier, Deputy Chief Dusenbury said.

Different Name Each Time

One Vietnamese teen-ager, arrested five times by Long Beach police since last fall, has used a different name each time, Titus said. But a tattoo has revealed his identity, the officer said.

Long Beach police acknowledge that they have only begun to understand the workings of Asian gangs in this city and have no clear idea of how many youths are committing crimes here. They say their arrests indicate that individual Asian gangs may have no more than a few members who operate as a team in carrying out thefts. Unlike long-established Long Beach black and Latino gangs, the Southeast Asian gangs usually cannot be identified by dress or gang name.

In Orange County, which has 100,000 Indochinese refugees out of some 600,000 nationwide, police officials have had more experience with Asian gangs. But they, too, say they do not know the number of gang members.

Lt. Robert Burnett of the Westminster Police Department, who has likened Indochinese youth gangs with “a pack of wolves,” said last week: “They go where the opportunity is . . . . They hold no jurisdictional boundaries. Wherever the Southeast Asian population is, that’s where they go.”

Series of Violent Crimes

Garden Grove Police Capt. Stanley Knee said that in 1986 his city experienced a violent series of robberies and shootings by Asian gangs.

“I think the potential is there for these groups to be as violent as the Chinese gangs, and certainly as violent as the Latino and black gangs,” Knee said.

Burnett and Knee, both recognized as Asian youth crime experts, said they suspect that Vietnamese gangs from their cities are now active in Long Beach.

That has been confirmed by the Orange County Vietnamese gang graffiti showing up on walls in the Cambodian community in Long Beach, Knee said. And Garden Grove officers have been told of a series of fights between their Vietnamese gangs and Long Beach Cambodians at a dance earlier this year, he said.

Long Beach police say, however, that disputes between Vietnamese and Cambodian youths are often set aside in the name of opportunity.

“You see mixed gangs. Vietnamese are starting to get Cambodians in there and train them, because there are a lot more Cambodians in our city. You are starting to see Cambodians turn up as suspects, where a year ago you didn’t see that,” a Long Beach organized crime officer said.

Reports of Extortion

While local police say they have received only four formal extortion complaints from Indochinese businessmen since November, 1986, Asian community sources tell them that perhaps another 15 are being forced to pay protection money. Most of the victims run bars and restaurants, one officer said.

Police say they think they have had only four complaints of Asian youth robbery in the last four months, although they say they have no formal system for categorizing such crimes. And organized crime-unit officers said they know of at least four other such robberies that were not reported.

John Westland, who has sponsored the immigration of many Cambodian families and is the business partner of a Cambodian, said he has heard about dozens of robberies of Cambodians here.

“It used to be that the Vietnamese were doing it to the Cambodians. But now the Cambodians are getting into the act, too, and it’s just a shame,” Westland said.

Grow to Trust Police

As a few Cambodians have grown to trust some Long Beach police officers, they have told them of extortion without identifying themselves as the victims, Titus said.

“It’s always, ‘My friend is having a problem. What can you do to help him?’ ” he said. “That creates a problem for the investigation and another problem for the prosecution.”

Once in court, even those who press charges often refuse to testify when confronted by gang members, say police here and in Orange County.

Thefts by Asian youths in the larger, non-Asian Long Beach community are easier to combat, police said. But, at first, they were hard to attribute to a specific source.

Police did not link the skyrocketing rate of auto burglary and theft to Asian gangs until arrests last fall began to confirm the connection, officers said.

“That was when we started having huge numbers of auto burglaries in the Belmont Shore-Belmont Heights area,” Titus said. “They were out there and organized, taking 15 or 20 expensive car stereos a night,” he said.

Some as Young as 12

In some cases, burglars as young as 12 would work for Indochinese in their 20s, police said.

“One guy said he was recruited from San Diego right off the street by an older Vietnamese person,” Titus said. “He’d give them a little on-the-job training on how to steal radios, and they’d receive a hundred dollars a night from him.”

Working in teams of three, the youths can complete a burglary--mostly on high-end Toyotas and BMWs--in minutes, Titus said. Orange County police said Datsun Z cars are also popular targets of Indochinese gangs. The stolen stereos can quickly be sold for $50 to $100 each, police said.

Long Beach police responded to the emerging burglary problem with increased training of patrol officers early this year, Dusenbury said. Heavy patrols were assigned to problem areas. Asian youths would be routinely stopped and several arrests were made, Titus said.

Police subsequently linked Vietnamese and Cambodian youths to auto thefts. “Then, every time we’d see two or three or four Southeast Asian males in a Toyota Celica or Supra we’d start running a make on the (license) plate. We started catching quite of few of them. Some were as young as 11 years old and had a hell of a time seeing over the wheel,” Titus said.